MENDOTA, Calif. (AP) — Amid California’s driest year on
record, the nation’s leading agricultural region is locked in drought
and bracing for unemployment to soar, sending farm workers to food lines
in a place famous for its abundance.
One-third of the Central
Valley’s jobs are related to farming. Strains on water supplies are
expected to force farmers to leave fields unplanted, creating a ripple
effect on food processing plant workers, truck drivers and those who
sell fertilizer, irrigation equipment and tractors.
No place may
be harder hit than Mendota, a small farm town where unemployment rose
above 40 percent at the height of the economic recession in 2009, also a
dry year. Mayor Robert Silva said he fears this year could be even
worse.
"We’re supposed to be the cantaloupe capital of the world," Silva said. "But we’re the
food line capital of the world."
Residents
of Mendota late last year began seeing tough times on the horizon when
little rain fell in the valley and snow didn’t blanket the High Sierra.
This marks the third consecutive dry year for California, and Gov. Jerry
Brown has declared a drought emergency.
This past week, the snow
pack’s water content was measured at 12 percent of normal. State
officials announced that they would not be sending water to California’s
agricultural customers. U.S. officials are expected in late February to
announce they will allot only a fraction of the federally controlled
water that farmers want, if any.
If that scenario plays out, Silva
estimates the lines they saw outside a Mendota food bank five years ago
could run three times as long this year. His town’s unemployment today
is at 34 percent — the highest in Fresno County — and interim City
Manager Don Pauley figures it will top 50 percent.
Officials at
Mendota’s City Hall aren’t the only uneasy ones. Steve Malanca, general
manager at Thomason Tractor in Firebaugh, said farmers have already told
him that digging deeper wells and buying irrigation water are higher
priorities in 2014 than investing in new farm equipment from him. With
reduced work in the fields, Malanca said it’s clear he will have to lay
off some of his 49 employees.
The ripple effect of drought extends
to the trucking companies that haul crops, tire companies that outfit
the big rigs and fuel suppliers who provide diesel, he said. Employees
at John Deere world headquarters in Moline, Ill., will feel
repercussions from drought in California, the biggest agricultural
producer, he said. So will the businesses that make cardboard boxes to
hold cantaloupes and the wooden pallets for stacking the boxes, Malanca
said. The list goes on.
"When you make a hay bale, you’ve got to
tie that bale with string," he said. "The supplier who made that string,
he’s going to be out of work, too."
A 2012 study by the
Agricultural Issues Center at the University of California, Davis, found
that farming and food processing industries created nearly 38 percent
of all Central Valley jobs. Every 100 farm and processing jobs create
work for another 92 people, said the report, which measured
agriculture’s impact on the state’s economy.
Fresno County led the
nation in farming in 2012, generating nearly $6.6 billion in economic
activity, said Ryan Jacobsen, executive director of the Fresno County
Farm Bureau. With no surface water for farmers, he anticipates that up
to 25 percent of irrigated field and orchards in the county will lay
unplanted.
This time of year, farmers start to plant tomatoes for
use as paste and spaghetti sauce. Next come onions, garlic and cotton,
which are among some 400 variety of crops grown in Fresno County.
Farmers may have no choice but to rip out permanent crops, such as
almond orchards and vineyards that take years to mature, or let them dry
up with no irrigation.
Jacobsen said the three months left in the
rainy season are not likely to rescue the year from drought. "We’re
right on the front edge of it," he said. "It’s going to worsen, worsen,
worsen."
In a good year, Chuck Herrin, owner of Sunrise Farm
Labor, based in Huron, puts between 1,000 to 3,500 people to work. He
said he will be lucky to hire 600 at the season’s peak, installing drip
irrigation systems, planting and harvesting crops.
Workers he
can’t put on the payroll will be forced to stand in food lines to feed
themselves and their families, Herrin said. "By August, September,
October, this will be a very tragic looking place," he said.
His
worry is echoed at the Los Banos Salvation Army, where residents gather
each weekday for a spiritual devotion before waiting to hear their names
called to collect a bag of donated food. Felicia Grant, a lieutenant at
the Salvation Army, fears that the drought will be so severe that
middle class families will need free food along with the farm workers.
She hopes that they’re not afraid to ask for help when the time comes.
Rick
Palermo of Community Food Bank in Fresno recently drove to Mendota,
Firebaugh and other rural communities in the Central Valley, scouting
places to hand out food. He’s been on the phone with state officials
gearing up for the high unemployment expected from drought-related job
losses. In 2009, the last bad year, his food bank, located in a massive
warehouse in an industrial area of Fresno, provided families with 10
million pounds of food.
While praying for a miracle, he’s trying
to estimate how much will be needed to feed masses of unemployed farm
workers this time around.
"We’re all doing our rain dance, hoping
it doesn’t come to that," he said. "Hopefully, the water comes, but if
it doesn’t, we’ll be ready."
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